What is our Endgame?

What is our endgame?

I feel like we are not fighting in the right area. Or at least not talking too much about it, in addition to everything else.

It’s been over a week since the world’s sports stage has shut down. It was a turning point for global sentiment, in my opinion. Until then, the world sees this as “other people’s problem”. I was shocked to see thousands of fans still filling packed stadiums to cheer loudly for their favourite pastime. Don’t get me wrong. I NEED sports. Background hockey games is the only thing that fills the air in my empty condo when I’m home. The void created by the lack of sports is eerie. But it was a wake up call. And hopefully it came in time, although I’m sure already a little late.

Worldwide, everything is being shut down. The earth, at least in the parts that dominates our headspace, is closed. This is perhaps the single biggest event most of us will ever see in our lifetime. I sincerely hope it is. Social distancing is the number catch phase on planet earth. Flatten the curve closely second. But all this is to buy us time. Time for what? What is our endgame?

We know we cannot fight this by social distance. And I do not believe as a globe we have the stamina to social distance for 1-2 years, which is probably the least amount of time required for a widespread vaccine to be rolled out even if a successful candidate were to be identified TODAY. Same for therapeutic treatment. We cannot wait for those, it would take too long.

I think the real fight needs to be in diagnostics and isolation. Currently, suspected cases have to be swabbed by a provider, and the swabs takes anywhere to hours (in other parts of the world) to up to 7 days here in Canada in the past week. Plus there’s a high risk of false negative. Furthermore, lack of supplies and inability to keep up with the pace of testing is forcing us to shut down widespread screening programs, thus essentially shoving our heads in the sand and making all of us fly blind for the next few weeks as we head into the heat of the battle.

As vaccines and therapies are likely months and years away, our only chance to end this might be to efficiently identify those transmitting disease, treat them while isolating effectively, then let the virus starve off, globally. Everything hinges on effective, cheap, rapid turn-around, and hopefully point of care testing.

I don’t feel that there’s enough international discussion and collaboration on this front. I started the discussion in our Canada physician facebook’s COVID19 focused group, and seems we are reliant on scattered companies and individuals around the world to make this happen. We need to bring them together (conceptually, online of course) to create something that can change the way we fight this battle.